2004 Week 8
October 28, 2004
First of all, I'd like to congratulate Mississippi State for their exciting upset win over Florida. I'm glad to see the Rebs get back to winning games. Coach Sherrill looked great, with a very healthy new tan.
Florida coach fireronzook.com had a nice welcome home parade. From personal experience I can assure him that tar does eventually wash off.
In other southern action, LSU beat Troy. I think we've now settled which team was the true BS national champion in 2003. Congratulations to Nick Satan!
Lots of college football experts remarked on Iowa's win over Penn State. The final score was 6-4, so they jokingly asked who was pitching, as 6-4 is a most unusual score.
Normally the only way to get six points is with three safeties, while to get four points a team would need a field goal and an extra point.
Actually the 6-4 result wasn't due to odd scoring. As part of a throwback weekend in honor of Joe Paterno's collegiate career at Brown, the two teams wore old-style uniforms and used the scoring system from JoePa's college days. Apparently touchdowns were worth 5 points and field goals 4 points during Joe's senior year of 1906.
While watching ESPN last Saturday, I saw my good friend Lee Corso making his prediction on Miami's game. He picked against the Canes and demonstrated that by dressing up as the mascot for Miami's opponent.
I wasn't aware that the Stanford mascot was a sled dog, and I wonder where they found a sled dog big enough to slaughter so that Lee could climb into his carcass. I also don't understand why Stanford is claiming a football national championship by putting the letters "N C" on their helmets.
In the Big Ten Purdue suffered another tough loss, this time to Floyd Carr's Michigan Wolverines. Each of the past two weeks the key play occurred when a Purdue ballcarrier flipped over and lost the ball.
I've been telling coaches for years that these tricky hook and ladder plays don't work when your player is trying to do a fancy handstand on the field. Purdue coach Wilfred Tiller took a real chance in hiring Roman gymnastics coach Bela Lugosi Junior to train his players to do those fancy gymnast moves.
Trying spinner plays is fine, that used to be a staple of the old single wing offense. But you don't do the spinning by going ass over applecart, you spin with both feet firmly planted on the ground.
I was talking to my good friend Herb Street about this, he started talking about some spinner play involving my good friend Jill Arrington and mentioned a bunch of things about leverage that I didn't quite understand.
The other big campus story this week was the return of celebrity Tommy Lee Jones to his alma mater of Nebraska. They even let Tommy Lee play with the Nebraska marching band, though I must say he had a most unusual way to perform--he managed to bang on the drum while both of his hands were raised in the air.
Tommy is far from the only celebrity to be a part of college football festivities. John Navarro took time out from his recording career with a rock and roll combo and his marriage to Carman Electric to play quarterback for Michigan.
And Ryan Grant Adams quit his musical career to play for both Notre Dame and Boston College. I'm guessing he started out at Notre Dame after BC dropped football a few years ago, then started splitting his time with both teams.
I was disappointed with the calls in Notre Dame's loss to BC, but that's what the Irish get for hiring anti-Catholic referees.
As we approach November, those of us in Ohio and Pennsylvania have been receiving a lot of national attention these days. It's building to a crescendo in the next few days: Camera crews everywhere, reporters, elected officials, and all this talk about the red state Ohio and the blue state Pennsylvania.
So I hope everyone else is as fired up as I am about Saturday's 7th place in the Big Ten showdown between the Buckeyes and the Nittany Lions.